Monitors

Before European hell broke loose, the business of policing the U. S. air waves was fairly simple. With seven eavesdropping monitor stations and 26 field auxiliaries, FCC pounced easily upon illicit transmitters, inspected ship and police radios, supervised the activities of the nation's hams. But since last June, when the President authorized a $1,600,000 fund for radio's defense efforts, aerial gumshoeing put on seven-megacycle gum boots, established a special National Defense Operations Section to supplement FCC's routine monitoring work. Now under construction are four new primary monitoring stations in Texas, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico. Ready to swing into action is a network of 72 secondary stations. Required personnel for the monitoring job: 520 men for the duration. Last week the new Defense Communications Board announced it was well along with a program insuring complete Governmental control over "radio, wire and cable communication facilities of all kinds" in case of war.

Equipped with sensitive long-range direction finders, FCC's monitors undertake by triangulation to locate the general area in which any bootleg sender--on land, sea or air -- is functioning. The inspectors from the secondary stations set out in innocent-looking sedans, fitted with receivers, recorders, direction finders and an FM transmitter with which to talk to one another. Favorite parking place sought by the mobile units is a cemetery, where there are no lights, telephones or overhead wires to interfere with monitoring work. Often field inspectors sleuth around for days before they root out the ethereal blind pig they are after.

Within the past year, FCC monitors have caught over 300 unlicensed stations. Although in the course of tracking down renegade operators FCC's monitor men meet espionage, sabotage and other subversive carryings-on, the only law the monitors can enforce (with the cooperation of local police) is the Communications Act. Incidental findings are turned over to FBI or to the Army or Navy Intelligence. Taciturn about their activities, the ether police talk for publication only about their wild-goose chases, most of which are started by hams, an extremely vigilant and patriotic lot.

Ingenious are the methods of the monitoring crews. Often they trace an illegal transmitter to a large office building. They find out which office houses the set by using portable detector outfits, small enough to fit into a vest pocket and equipped with indicators geared to rise with proximity to the transmitter. Most such bootleg equipment is used by gamblers, who are often able, by means of quick flashes, to place last-minute bets on horse races already run.

Head of the National Defense Operations Section of FCC's monitoring division is George E. Sterling, who helped organize the first radio intelligence unit of the Army in World War I, served as an inspector for the Department of Commerce before FCC took over radio. An inveterate ham, Sterling works in a welter of receivers, transmitters, microphones, recording devices. Temperate in his attitude about radio defense, he is inclined to be lenient with accidental shortcomings of his fellow enthusiasts, doesn't crack down unless violations are flagrant.

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